Feather Bound

  Sarah Raughley

  FEATHER BOUND

  To my mom and dad

  1

  FUNERAL

  At precisely seven in the morning, my oldest sister, Ericka, arrived at our Brooklyn shack and was horrified to find our dad sprawled out on the couch, basting in a sea of beer cans. Half an hour later, he was waxing poetic about his freshly dead college chum, too drunk to put his pants on the right way, while Ericka tried to shove a tie around his neck. She looked like she’d rather strangle him with it.

  “Deanna! Right sleeve!”

  “What?”

  I could barely hear Ericka over the music blaring and her baby’s screeching. The poor kid had been shoved in a baby car seat and abandoned in the corner of the room, probably hungry and definitely mad as hell.

  “Right. Sleeve!”

  “OK, OK! Goddamn.”

  I pulled both spaghetti straps back up on my shoulders and went to work. My job was my dad’s jacket, which was ten years too small for him. But then, I didn’t even have my clothes fully on yet, what with my black dress half-zipped and the right leg of my sheer pantyhose dragging on the floor. My other sister Adrianna, on the other hand, straightened her hair calmly in the bathroom opposite Dad’s room. I could see her shaking her head through the bathroom mirror across the hall, probably secretly wishing she could record this mess and put it up online.

  Must be nice to be the sister who doesn’t give a damn, I thought. I would have yelled it, but Dad’s armpits were in my face. Needless to say, it was imperative that my mouth stayed closed.

  “Ade!” Ericka shot her a withering glance from behind Dad. “Can you at least turn the music off?” Since it was coming from her laptop. “And Dad, for God’s sake, pull yourself together!”

  “I’m sorry.” My dad slurred his words because drinking in the wee hours of the morning never failed to test one’s alcohol tolerance level.

  I wiped my brow before a droplet of sweat could drip into my eyes. In a house that was already intensely stuffy, being under Dad’s pits did not help. “Oh God, look, let’s just forget the whole thing,” I said, dropping his arm half-sheathed and straightening up. “Dad, you haven’t even talked to Hedley in years.”

  I already knew what he’d say before he said it. “No, we’re going. After everything he did for us. All the opportunities, all the chances...”

  Ericka mangled his collar until it was respectably flat over his tie. “Deanna has a point, Dad. My mother-in-law was friends with Hedley’s wife so I have to go, but you don’t have to come with me.” With a desperate smile, she added, “Why don’t you just stay home and let me represent the family, hmm?”

  But Dad just shook his head. Ericka’s smile dropped from her face. Couldn’t blame her for trying. Dad was a fiasco waiting to happen and a girl could only repress so much.

  “I just can’t believe it. Cancer. I didn’t even know he was sick.” Dad sighed. The sudden onslaught of booze, halitosis and stale nachos nearly made me faint.

  “And?” Ade put on her eyeliner. “Dad, you told us yourself, the guy didn’t even talk to you after you got fired. Then he kicked it. So I mean, what’s the issue? No point in getting all broken up over it. At the end of the day, he’s just some dead rich guy.”

  “Adrianna!” Ericka hissed, fighting with Dad’s collar.

  She shrugged. “What? Am I wrong?”

  Technically no, but Ade was never really one for details. Dad and Ralph Hedley were actually really good friends in college. Dad had been an ace student in high school and managed to land a full ride to Yale where he met Hedley, the son of a billionaire who owned an entire magazine company – boringly named Hedley Publications. I still couldn’t really fathom how the two of them managed to strike up such a strong friendship. Not exactly two of a kind.

  To Hedley’s credit, he managed to score Dad a job as an accountant for one of his magazines.

  “Whoops, down he goes,” said Ade when Dad tipped over, though Ericka kept him steady.

  Yep, accountant – before the binge drinking finally landed him on the unemployment list. Only so much a friend can do after you throw up on one of your co-workers.

  So, there we were, the Davis family, cramped in one of the many yellow boxes lining the street while the “head of the household” packaged beverages in a warehouse, because after a string of firings and a ruined reputation he couldn’t get a job anywhere else.

  I guess in a way, going to Ralph Hedley’s funeral was a nice gesture on Dad’s part. Paying his last respects, seeing an old friend off to the afterlife or whatever the hell. But if there was anything worth weeping over, it was living in a house with light fixtures that were rusting off the walls and faucets that periodically leaked in floods.

  Ade finally breezed into Dad’s room, crisp, clean and cloaked in mournful black – which made the breathy, gossipy lilt to her voice all the more jarring: “Oh, by the way, have you guys actually heard the rumours about Hedley?” The way my dad’s shoulders tensed told me he had. “Pretty messed up, right? And if they’re true–”

  Dad’s bottom lip curled. “They’re not.” He said it with the sort of hard edge that would have been an intimidating conversation ender if Dad weren’t wobbling ridiculously on his feet.

  “Ah, the rumour,” I said. The one about Hedley and his wife.

  “Yup! I mean, if it’s true, then that’d pretty much be proof right there that Hedley was a complete monster when he was alive. And now he’s dead. See? No great loss after all!” But Ade stopped there, flashing Dad an innocent grin when he glared at her.

  It was just a rumour… but honestly, it was part of the reason I couldn’t understand why Dad would drink himself half to death over this. Ade was right: whatever memories he was holding on to had long since ceased to be relevant.

  Actually, if there was anyone here who had a reason to get lost in nostalgia this morning, it wasn’t Dad. It was me.

  Dad wasn’t the only one with a dead Hedley to mourn.

  A crash. Ericka’s screaming baby started shrieking as if he were determined to shatter the mirrors with his mighty baby lungs. Dad finally collapsed onto the bed, exhausted and half-dressed. Ericka stayed Ericka, which generally involved copious amounts of freaking out.

  Leaning against the wall with the right leg of my pantyhose pooled on the carpet floor, I stared up at the cracked light fixture hanging from the ceiling and shook my head. “Just kill me,” I breathed.

  Ade slinked up to me and patted me on the shoulder. “OK. I’ll go turn off the music.”

  They kept the casket closed throughout the church service. Thank God. Seeing dead bodies always made me nauseous, even when the bodies were on TV and the death was painted on with brushes. The last time I’d seen a body in real life was nine years ago, when I was eight. It was my mom. The blood had been sucked out of her veins, replaced with a mixture of chemicals that gave her skin a waxy coat. She’d looked as if she’d been wrapped in plastic: glossy and dried up until she wasn’t even my mother anymore.

  Hers had been a winter funeral; her casket lowered under metric tons of snow. Today was way nicer. A bright, hot, sunny June day: much better weather for burying a rotting carcass.

  Oh God. What the hell is wrong with me? I pried my hands away from each other because I’d just realized that I’d been wringing them too tightly. A pool of red flooded my palms. They were shaking. Mom’s bracelet jingled as it dangled off my wrist.

  I understood, just then, why Dad had been drinking last night. Burying Mr Hedley meant digging up the past. The days of Mom.

  A hand touched my shoulder – Adrianna’s. “You OK, Dee?”

  Standing next to me, she looked almost as pretty as Mom always had during Sunday mass at church. Ade’s hai
r, whenever she straightened it, cascaded down her back like a charcoal waterfall, but it never looked as good as the natural curls all three Davis sisters had. Mom’s hair.

  I gripped her hand, squeezing it appreciatively. Ade was nineteen – two years older than me – and yet in that moment, with that one maternal gesture, she was able to feign the kind of maturity I knew she didn’t actually have.

  “Yeah, I’m OK.” I’m thinking about our decomposing mother, I didn’t say. “I’m just hot.”

  A half-lie. I was hot. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me, but I could have sworn the heat was actually searing the hair off my arms. I could feel the sweat beading underneath my clothes. I took off my cropped jacket and slung it over my shoulder.

  The bearers had already lowered the casket into the hole in the ground that would be Ralph Hedley’s final resting place.

  “They say you can always tell how a man lived his life by the gathering at his funeral. And from what I can tell by looking at you all, Ralph Hedley was a man well-loved.”

  I wondered about that. It was hard to judge from the sea of emotionless and distracted faces surrounding the gravesite.

  Adrianna stood next to me with her long, willowy limbs crossed. While her eyes were on the casket, they looked almost glazed; it was hard to tell whether it was a pensive, introspective sort of glazed, or if she was really just bored.

  Dad wasn’t doing anything humiliating, but he did look as if he was going to puke, though I didn’t know whether that was because of his emotional turmoil or the hangover.

  Ericka held her baby tightly in her arms. Beanpole – er, her husband – wasn’t anywhere in sight. Odd, considering his rich mother was the reason why she’d come in the first place. She pursed her lips, undoubtedly annoyed.

  And then there were the guests. Elite types, naturally. All of them in thousand-dollar suits and funeral-appropriate black couture. Good of them to take the time to show up, except not one of them could even muster enough energy to act as if being at a friend’s funeral was a sad thing.

  Holy hell, these people. Coldest funeral ever. The poorly concealed photogs sneaking around – cameras in hand – made it all the more awkward.

  “Whoa,” Ade nudged me in the ribs and flicked her head their way. “The pap. How’s my hair?” she added rather tackily.

  There were two of them – no, three. I saw one hiding behind a tree, clicking as fast as his finger would allow. At a funeral. Well, at the very least they had brass balls to go along with their utter lack of human morals.

  Except the guy sitting on the bench a few yards away by a stone cross. I couldn’t see a camera on him. He was just sitting there in a black vest and gray beanie, his arm slung over the back of the bench. He barely even flinched when a reporter in a long beige trench coat skulked passed him. He was too busy watching us. Intently. Huh. Probably memorizing the details for his inevitable blog post.

  The priest, with his back to them, didn’t seem to notice. “Despite the joy he brought to many of us, Ralph had his share of loss in life, some might say more than many men. As per his request, we bury him here today next to his wife, Clarice Hedley, and his adopted son–”

  “Hyde Hedley.” I’d whispered out the name with a tremor of breath. At the sound of it, the muscles in my arms twitched and my stomach churned. I bit my lip as if the pain would help me shove the image of a ten year-old’s chubby face back into the recesses of my memories. It didn’t. Like I said, Dad wasn’t the only one with a dead Hedley to remember.

  “Nine years have passed since his wife and son returned to God. Let us pray now that Ralph finds peace with the people he’d loved with his whole heart.”

  “Except he didn’t.”

  The trench-coated reporter stood just a few feet away, her shaggy hair as fiery as the righteous indignation in her eyes.

  The priest’s white moustache crinkled with his frown. “I beg your pardon, young lady?”

  Shutters flew at the speed of light. Her pap friends must have put her up to it because they were sure getting a kick out of it now. And yet the more I looked at Trench-Coat Girl, the less I was sure she was a Page Six employee.

  “Mr Hedley loved his family with his whole entire heart, huh?” Her bare ankles peaked out from under the beige cotton of the coat, a flush of pink between that and her worn out Hello Kitty sneakers. With her arms folded over her chest, she stared down the congregation with an almost war-like readiness. In all honesty, I couldn’t even figure out if I was supposed to take her seriously. “So he was a family man,” she went on. “On a scale of what, Stalin to Hitler?”

  “Who the hell are you?” said a woman who hid her turnip face behind a net of black. “Who do you think you–?”

  Trench-Coat Girl took off her trench coat.

  “Oh. My...” Ade couldn’t even finish. The sound of an entire funeral congregation gasping all at once would have drowned her out anyway. The paparazzi didn’t even bother hiding anymore.

  Apparently, neither did Trench-Coat Girl.

  Her feet were the only parts of her bare pasty-white body I couldn’t see. That alone was shocking enough. But then she turned, just slightly, and there they were – feathers draping her back. They flitted in the breeze, some fluttering to the freshly cut grass in a shower of white down.

  No one could talk.

  “You really want to know how much Mr Hedley loved his wife?” continued the girl, whose trench coat had now been thoroughly discarded. “Come on, I’m sure you’ve all heard the rumours. For those of you who haven’t, you’ll hear it here first.”

  And then Trench-Coat Girl spread her arms wide, her feathers flying up as if blown by a sudden gust. “Ralph Hedley’s wife,” she announced so the paparazzi wouldn’t miss a word, “was a swan.”

  Silence. Silence and pictures.

  “You all know this. She was a swan, like me. Like some of you, I bet. And Mr Hedley ‘won’ her love by stealing her feathers. Slavery: a love story for the ages, am I right?”

  My dad stumbled back. Ericka grabbed his arm with her free hand. For a second I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

  “I’m sorry to disrespect someone on the day of his funeral, I honestly am.” She didn’t look it. “But it’s time to stop turning a blind eye to the suffering of others! It’s time to stand up and do what’s right! End Swan Slavery! Freedom for feathers now!”

  I barely had time to process what I was watching before she took off down the street, her feathers leaving a trail of white strokes behind her.

  A TALE

  Somewhere, just outside a tiny village, is a lake. Eight heavenly maidens bathe there. They sit by the shore, oblivious to the world. Water shimmers in their cupped hands, trickles through their fingers, runs down their legs. Moonlight coats their white feathers.

  The young man sees them from behind the trees. Their beauty enchants him.

  Quietly, he comes back and sends his dog to steal the feather robe of the youngest. The seven sisters cry out and fly off into the sky. But the youngest cannot.

  Now she is his.

  Once of the heavens, she is now bound to the earth. Bound to the young man.

  He builds a house and they marry. Their children sing every day.

  Behind every myth is a truth that inspired it. Everyone knows about swans. But I learned the fairytale first. When I was a child I thought it was romantic. But then I began to wonder. The young man – when did he learn the poor girl’s name?

  2

  GHOST

  “Oh my God, it’s like I can’t text fast enough.”

  Ade certainly tried. The funeral was in chaos. Since the protester had left, about half the congregation were on their phones. Scandalized whispers blanketed the graveyard. I didn’t know why any of them were pretending to be shocked, though. Ralph Hedley’s wife was a swan. The news had broken almost as soon as Hedley had died, plastered everywhere from the blogosphere to CNN.

  I wasn’t quite sure how people even found ou
t, to be honest. There was no way a prominent New York socialite like Clarice Hedley would have told anyone she was a swan. The shame alone would have killed her.

  I personally tried not to let myself get carried away with unproven rumours. But I was almost a hundred percent certain that half of the millionaires and socialites currently feigning shock right now had already gossiped about this at length behind closed doors.

  Soon the limos started to arrive. People were fleeing. I was sure they’d turn up to the reception to gossip some more. Ericka blocked her baby’s face from the paparazzi and turned to the rest of us. “We’ll have to wait at the church until our ride gets here. Come on.” A little too eagerly, she yanked me by the wrist, so hard I almost dropped the jacket still slung over my shoulders.

  “Relax, Ericka,” I said, pulling my arm out of her grasp. After one last look at the feathers on the ground where Trench-Coat Girl had stood, I followed her.

  “Ugh. Are we seriously still going to the reception? After all that?” Ade leaned over the back of my pew, her head cushioned by her arms. “When a naked swan shows up at a funeral and accuses the dead guy of enslaving his wife, isn’t it time to call off the after party?”

  “Ralph Hedley, a feather stealer. But it’s just a rumor, right? I mean, how could she really know for sure?” I swiveled around to face Ade properly, one leg on the pew, the other balancing Ericka’s sleeping baby. “I mean, just because a man has a swan for a wife, that doesn’t necessarily mean he stole her feathers to…” How did Trench-Coat Girl put it? To win her love. It was just so creepy. I rested my head against my hand. “Who was that girl, anyway?”

  “Way ahead of you.”

  When I looked up again, Ade’s cell phone was in my face. On the screen was a picture of Trench-Coat Girl, minus the nudity, being dragged away by an officer while a mass of young adults yelled things at a line of police officers in riot gear. The headline above it read: Activists Arrested at G8 Summit. Chaos in the streets.